Smartphone UI: Apple Wins Major Patent

Bangalore,India: Apple has been fervently applying for patents on its iPhone since early 2007, and once again its perseverance was rewarded with a patent win. Apple has been granted a patent for “Portable electronic device,method and graphical user interface for displaying electronic lists and documents”. Apple finds itself in patent litigation battles on all fronts, especially pointing its guns towards Samsung, against whom it recently won a case to have the Galaxy 10.1 tablet banned for sale in the US. The newly granted patent is of great concern to major mobile phone manufacturers, especially as many phones could possibly seen to be infringing on this patent. According to the website Patently Apple, the patent covers “UI modules covering blogging, email, television, camera, video player, calendar,browser,widgets” and may more. Basically, the patent entails that Apple owns the method in which a user traverses a list on a portable device. The listing methodology on the camera roll in Music in the iPhone is an innovation by Apple, and hence cannot be used on any other device. It is still not clear as to broad the patent can be comprehended, as apparently it seems to put many phones from HTC,Samsung and other manufacturers into the firing line. While Apple claims that it patents all of its innovations to prevent blatant copycats, there are also many others who argue that much of Apple's patents can actually be invalidated using “prior art”, which has been conveniently forgotten by the IP court system in the US. The touch-only user interface of Apple's was initially designed as a response to physical buttons becoming insufficient to access the increasing amounts of functions and information stored on phones